An online magazine about people and the internet
What is the internet doing to people — and what are people doing with the internet?
America’s biggest online stores are mostly navigable right up until the moment money changes hands. The checkout — the one page a retailer would obviously want to work — is where everything falls apart.
Our reporter used the internet the way a blind user does — screen dark, voice only — for seven days. Banking took an hour. Ordering dinner took three tries. Twitter, weirdly, worked.
Guillermo Robles just wanted dinner. The website wouldn't let him order it. The lawsuit that followed decided whether the Americans with Disabilities Act applies to the internet at all.
Applying for food assistance in Missouri now means calling a phone line where you might be 692nd in the queue. The digital door was sold as access — and financed by quietly closing every other one.
Four weeks, fifty cancellations, eleven phone calls to human beings. The real discovery wasn’t the hold music — it’s that the easy door in and the hard door out were built by the same company, on purpose.
83 pieces across 6 territories